An overmatched electric fan can’t stop sweat from forming on Matthew Rodriguez’s forehead. Clad in a protective leather jacket and welding helmet, he puts a torch to a lowrider bicycle frame he’d curved by hand around an old tire rim. And even when the weld breaks, his demeanor is cool.

“I’ll just do it again,” says Rodriguez, laboring inside Shorty Fatz, the shop where he designs and custom builds some of the most amazing, aerodynamic bicycles imaginable. No matter that the welding machine is working on half-power. “I’ve always worked with whatever I could find. Most of the time, I just make my own tools.”

With low-tech tools and no formal training in bicycle building, Rodriguez and his design partner Sam Rodriguez, have created unique rolling sculptures for anyone who loves riding low, slow, ultra-ultra cool bikes.

They’ve blended the geometry of lowrider bikes from Mexican-American barrios decades ago, with the newer, sleek look of Asian motorcycles. And they’ve added artistic, graffiti-inspired characters – the offspring of Japanese anime women and Aztec warriors.

Some original barrio styles have busted out with commercial success, but as yet, the duo has only sold about two dozen bikes since starting Shorty Fatz late last year. But their work is garnering the kind of artistic validation that is incalculable.

Along with bikes shown at the Oakland Museum of Art and San Jose’s Anno Domini gallery, they have won admiration from a legend in the high-performance bicycle world.

“They’ve come up with a viable new style for what people want right now,” says Peter Enright, president of Phil Wood & Co. Bicycle inventors often get disappointing reviews from the famed hub-maker, but the Shorty Fatz creators immediately blew his tires off.

“They were very hardworking and dedicated,” says Enright. “Even though they don’t know nada, zilch, nothing about high-performance bicycle design, that’s not what’s important right now.”

Circuitous route

Growing up in East San Jose, Matthew and Sam, who are not related, followed fitful paths before landing on custom bicycle design.

Stocky and taciturn, Matthew, 28, built his first lowrider at age 13 after learning welding from an uncle. But in high school he was steered into commercial painting, and customizing lowrider bikes remained a hobby.

“Nobody ever said I could make a living at this,” he says, “or else I would have started earlier.”

Meanwhile, Sam’s talent for painting and pressure from street gangs led him into the underworld of tagging and graffiti, which earned him a short stint in juvenile lockup.

“I got very upset with myself,” says Sam, a year younger than Matthew, who went on to study painting at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and become a graphic artist. Discovered by journalist and publisher Sandy Close, a MacArthur “genius award” winner, she hooked him up with DeBug, an urban arts and commentary magazine in San Jose.

Magic synergy

Although they knew one another for years, they didn’t collaborate until Matthew married Sam’s sister. A magic synergy was born when Sam painted one of Matthew’s lowriders, and the partnership has outlived the marriage.

In 2006, the Anno Domini art gallery commissioned a show of their traditional lowriders built from Schwinn cruisers. However, a fateful accident stopped the show when Matthew broke a leg in a motorcycle crash.

“I told him, ‘Maybe this is a good time to break out of form and dig into your creativity,’ ” Sam says. Matthew declares: Sam was right.

“I was getting bored. There can be too much tradition in lowrider bikes,” Matthew says. “You can’t do this. You can’t do that. You have to stay with original Schwinn parts, whatever. I needed to try something new.”

Sam challenged Matthew to design a bicycle frame on which he could paint his new characters.

The result was Ping, an extra long, reclining lowrider. It featured a coffin-shaped tank on which Sam painted a toothy, smiling Olmec-Asian character. The duo built a few more show bikes based on the recumbent-like frame.

The folks at Anno Domini were delighted with the radical Ping models and debuted them in 2007. The Oakland Museum called next, commissioning a new bike.

The Ping series, however, was too eccentric and expensive for most buyers. By then Matthew and Sam had decided to start Shorty Fatz bikes. Matthew got to work on a production model.

Unique design

“I’ve seen everything in bikes, and their frame is truly unique,” says Enright, a guru of world-class bicycle design of the production model. He loves its pointy front that resembles a motorcycles’s air scoop and the high crankset hub, which makes the machine easier to pedal. Very wide, curved chain stays for the rear wheel add sexiness and sculptural balance at a point where most frames tend to end efficiently but abruptly.

Not for serious commuting or racing, Shorty Fatz creations are for feeling cool and looking good at cruising speed. Enright is so sure the Shorty Fatz frame is a winner, he’s become a non-paid consultant and is developing a computer-assisted-design for factory production.

“They’re so endearing to work with,” Enright says about Sam and Matthew. “But they have a window of only about three years. If they don’t get this bike out, it’ll be copied by someone else.”

Sam and Matthew have become aware of the urgency. Like typical start-up entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, they work long hours and think of nothing else. Matthew is designing a taller, higher performance version while Sam is developing more hybrid characters, T-shirts and other accessory items.

“We feel the timing is right for us,” Sam says, noting the spikein gasoline prices. “When there’s a greater demand for bikes, there will be more demand for creativity in bikes.”

Do you have a story idea for East Side/West Side? Contact Joe Rodriguez at jrodriguez@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5767.

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